Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do: Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable

By Joel Heng Hartse

Writing about music, far from being the specialized domain of the rock critic with encyclopedic knowledge of micro-genres or the fancy-pants star journalist flying on private planes with Led Zeppelin, has become something almost any music lover can do--and does. It's been said, however, that writing about music is a difficult, even pointless enterprise--an absurd impossibility, like "dancing about architecture." But aside from the fact that dancing about architecture would be awesome, what is that ineffable something that drives people to write about music at all? In this short, insightful book, Joel Heng Hartse unpacks the rock writer Richard Meltzer's assertion that writing about music should be a "parallel artistic effort" with music itself--and argues that music and the impulse to write about it is part of the eminently mysterious desire for meaning-making that makes us human.

Touching on the close resonances between music, language, love, and belief, Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do is relevant to anyone who finds deep human and spiritual meaning in music, writing, and the mysterious connections between them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781498293839

Joel Heng Hartse

Joel Heng Hartse is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His music criticism has appeared in Paste, Geez, Image, the Stranger, Christianity Today, Christ & Pop Culture, and many other publications. He is author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll (Cascade, 2010) and co-author of Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (2015). He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and sons. Sects, Love and Rock & Roll book launch (2010) from Joel HH on Vimeo.

Book preview

Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do

Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable

Joel Heng Hartse

Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do

Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable

Copyright ©

2022

Joel Heng Hartse. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9382-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9384-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9383-9

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Heng Hartse, Joel.

Title: Dancing about architecture is a reasonable thing to do : writing about music, meaning, and the ineffable / Joel Heng Hartse.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2022

| Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-4982-9382-2 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-4982-9384-6 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-4982-9383-9 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—History and criticism. | Musical criticism. | Popular music—Religious aspects.

Classification:

ML3470 H464 2022 (

print

) | ML3470 (

ebook

)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

On Writing about Music

Why Dancing about Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do

(I Feel Sad That Chris Walla Is No Longer in Death Cab for Cutie and Other Emotions)

What Dancing about Architecture Does, or How Words and Dreams and a Million Screams Make Weezer

(A List of Things That Might Happen When You Write about Music)

How Dancing about Architecture Is Possible, or What is This, and Is It Any Good?

(Confession of Faith)

Attempts at Dancing about Architecture

FAITH

All Things Go: How Sufjan Stevens Changed What It Means to Make Christian Music

How Not to Listen to Sufjan Stevens

Luxury: Transcendence and Transgression

Superfluous Beauty: An Interview with Slim Moon

LAMENT

Old Time Bible House

Lord Have Mercy: The Songs and Life of Judee Sill

Ripping through Flesh, Wailing

HOPE

The Dears: Protest

There is Only One Thing: Stars and the Soft Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution

Rocking Out with the Weakerthans

TRANSCENDENCE

Perfect Sound Forever

Groans Too Deep

The Lemon of Pink

SELF

Invisible Balloon

World Wide Pants

Static Waves

(Coda: Silence)

Bibliography

This book is very engaging! Joel Heng Hartse gives a heartfelt apologia for writing about music. He suggests that the writer is not merely a commentator but an artist himself crafting and responding to the art with something new and creative. . . . An inspiring book. I strongly recommend it for music fans and musicologists alike.

—

Christopher Foley

, Bass Player, Luxury

I enjoy Joel’s thoughtful perspective and casual profundities, of which there are plenty. But to me, what makes Joel a great music writer is the fact that he spent an entire semester abroad hunting down a single used CD from an obscure indie band. It’s what any reasonable person would do.

—

Drew Dernavich

, Cartoonist, The New Yorker

This book is about the love of music. At times, it is a love poem to music . . . . At other times, it is an exploration of our humanity, why and how we seek meaning through music. Above all, at a time when we are overwhelmed with musical content and noise, Heng Hartse’s book grounds the reader with a tangible sense of the richness and wonder that is music.

—

Alan Noble

, Oklahoma Baptist University

In this wide-ranging book, the relation between criticism and composition . . . is set aside for something emergent and difficult. Something verging on ineffable. The lack of aesthetical pretension, the presence of real examples and first-person experience—all of this and more make reading this book, as a scholar and musician, exciting and, dare I say, joyful. The meaning of the word finds itself ‘worlded’ within its own being, told to us in witty, warm prose.

—

Sam Rocha

, University of British Columbia

For Sarah, who will probably not read this but without whom it would not have been written

. . . the art critic can never be epistemologically capable of describing art by thinking at being, but must think from and within being. I have thus deemed it a necessity to describe rock ’n’ roll by allowing my description to be itself a parallel artistic effort.

—

Richard Meltzer

, The Aesthetics of Rock

It all has to do with it.

—

John Coltrane

, in the liner notes to A Love Supreme

Acknowledgments

Thanks to editors and professors under whose auspices certain pieces here were written and ideas developed over the last twenty years or so, including Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Greg Wolfe, David Stacey, Tom Trzyna, Katelyn Beaty, Luke Reinsma, Mary Ann Creadon, Ted Olsen, Kate Shellnutt, Aaron Epp, Aiden Enns, Alan Noble, Patton Dodd, Corrie Mitchell, Jason Dodd, Hank Sims, Andrew David, Chris Keller, Hank Sims, and Luke Baumgarten.

Thanks to gracious readers, Chrindie heads, and friends like Mischa Willett, Jason Morehead, Alan Parish, Adrian Parrish, Ryan Ruppe, and literally everyone else who read the first book.

Thanks to musicians who had something to say back to me when I wrote something about them, including Torquil Campbell, Sally Ellyson, Dan Messé, Lee Bozeman, and Chris Foley.

Thanks to kindred spirits in making music mean, including Hedy Law, Matt Smith, Nathan Conant, Kevin Scott Davis, Matt Basinger, Andrew Best, and Daniel Boatsman.

Thanks to Ben and Ollie for many sing-alongs.

Thanks to Clare Sully-Stendahl for being incredibly good at tracking down original sources.

Thanks to Chris Spinks for letting me do this again.

Some portions of this book were first published in slightly different forms and are reprinted here with permission:

Why Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do was originally published as Making Meaning out of Music, or Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do in Image, Issue 86.

Some portions of What Dancing about Architecture Does were published in "Are Weezer’s Songs from the Black Hole Pinkerton in Its Truest Form?" by Popmatters, on the web.

How Not to Listen to Sufjan Stevens was originally published as How Not to Listen to the New Sufjan Stevens Album in Christianity Today, on the web.

Luxury: Transcendence and Transgression was originally published as Transcendence, Transgression, and Rock & Roll: The Music of Luxury in Christ & Pop Culture, Volume 2, Issue 13.

A shorter version of the interview with Slim Moon was originally published online by OnFaith, which no longer exists.

Old Time Bible House was originally published in North Coast Journal.

Ripping through Flesh, Wailing was originally published in the Inlander.

The Dears: Protest was originally published online by Bandoppler, which no longer exists.

There is Only One Thing: Stars and the Soft Revolution was originally published as Stars: Set Yourself on Fire in the Other Journal, on the web.

Dance Dance Revolution was originally published as Ass-Shaking Great Awakening in Geez, Issue 11.

Rocking Out with the Weakerthans contains elements of Beyond the Pomo Blues with the Weakerthans, originally published by the Other Journal, on the web, and The Weakerthans Make Strong Music, originally published by Beliefnet, on the web.

Perfect Sound Forever was originally published as The Pitch Goes On by the Behemoth, Issue 53, on the web.

Groans Too Deep contains elements of Groans too Deep for Words, originally published in Christianity Today, and The Worship-Ness of Sigur Rós, originally published by Beliefnet, on the web.

World Wide Pants was originally published by the Inlander.

Introduction

Criticism often feels like the wrong word for writing about popular music. I’ve written about music professionally (and unprofessionally) for twenty years, but even when I was regularly hustling for alt-weekly and magazine music-writing gigs, I struggled with what to call myself. Music critic felt and feels wrong, because I don’t think most music writing actually jives with our pop culture’s depiction of the critic, an elitist, cynical know-it-all who doles out bad reviews—like Anton Ego in Ratatouille,

¹

or Andy Bernard in The Office

²

when he’s contemplating a career change (I could be a food critic: ‘These muffins taste bad.’ Or an art critic: ‘That painting is bad.’), or my personal favorite, Futurama’s

³

Dr. Zoidberg, who simply shouts at a symphony, Your music’s bad and you should feel bad!

Professional appreciator—the term used by Rob Gordon, the protagonist of the venerable music-nerd film High Fidelity

⁴

—comes closer to what I think people who write about music are at heart. Lover is sometimes the best I can come up with. Nerd may be a close second. Both suggest a kind of helpless resignation, an admission that for some reason, and not necessarily a professional one, we are stuck doing this almost whether we want to or not, listening to and enjoying and being frustrated by and commenting on and writing about music.

For a while I had writer-about-music as my title in my email signature. It was at least more expansive, more in line with what I wanted to be, which is not primarily a reviewer of music or a critiquer of it, but someone who wants to exegete and explore every nook and cranny of pop music, from the sounds to the feelings to the economics to the sociology to the aesthetics, on and on, endlessly. For those of us already stuck in the pop music world, it matters very little what we call ourselves. We’re going to be writing, reading, and thinking about music even if it doesn’t make us any money or add any appreciable benefits to our lives. (And it won’t, really, except for the occasional free concert ticket, which is not at all as exciting as it sounds.) I believe, I really do, that music is gloriously superfluous to survival, that it offers a surfeit of meaning and beauty that immeasurably enriches life. As the great songwriter Rich Mullins once said, Of all things, music is the most frivolous and the most useless. You can’t eat it, you can’t drive it, you can’t live in it, you can’t wear it. But your life wouldn’t be worth much without it.

⁵

There are many of us who need no convincing in this area. As they say on the internet: if you know, you know.

Music is one of many life-enriching cultural practices which, because it is so beloved, ends up having a whole discourse community built around it. For some people maybe it’s food, or movies, or fashion, or technology. Whatever it is, if there’s a subreddit or a thousand blogs or a newspaper column or a book about it, the people generating the discourse about it didn’t seek a professional identity in That Thing We Nerd Out About first: it was always the love. We see something that makes an otherworldly, primal connection, and we think Yes. This. More of this. And we start to try to figure out why that’s happening and what the implications are and why it works differently for other people and why it is extremely important to, for example, explain the deeply beautiful and tragic arc of a relationship that plays out over the course of the last few Björk albums, or why the Funky Drummer sample endures, or how the syncopation works on that weirdly off-kilter Radiohead song. And we run with it, and we make more and more stuff about it. There is something that drives us not simply to experience these cultural practices and artifacts we love, and not even simply to enjoy them, but to participate in and become part of them even if we are not, strictly speaking, making them. But in fact, writing about music is, in a very real way, to make it, to participate in building a world where it matters. I take that Richard Meltzer quote from the epigraph as my mantra: writing about music is an activity that comes from the same place, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially, and cognitively, as making it.

Writing about popular music is, or it can be, so much more than reviewing songs or albums. At its best, writing about music illuminates the world. It’s a deeply personal thing, a desire-driven, participatory creation. It’s an excavation of the self. It’s an autopsy of feeling. It’s phenomenological autoethnography. It’s an objective description of your subjective encounter with a transcendent experience. It’s an act of meaning-making, of love, of self-disclosure, of self-giving, of communication, of meaning, of prayer, of worship. I see the desire to talk about music or write about it or understand it some way as part of the same creative and extravagant and maybe even religious impulse that is behind a lot of human activity: behind music, behind language, behind artmaking,